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ObeyAndre the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on a design by Shepard Fairey created in 1986 in Charleston, South Carolina which has since developed into a successful clothing brand called OBEY clothing. Originally distributed by the skate community, the Andre stickers began showing up in nearly every big city across the U.S.A. Later, when Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, he released his manifesto and declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and World War II icon "Kilroy Was Here". Fairey's work has since evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY phenomenon.
By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Paris, Greece, London, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, Istanbul and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image compelling.
Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant but has since expanded into including cultural and influential icons from many eras. In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters. Furthermore, the popular "OBEY" slogan and stylized André The Giant face continues to be reproduced on products ranging from art and clothing to home accessories and decor, considerably expanding the impact of the campaign through iconology based on an allegiance to media and popular culture in the guise of counterculture. |
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